This one’s a little different but is nonetheless a very important part of my experience in India, and the primary reason I ended up coming here in the first place. It’s something I both will and won’t miss at the same time, but hear me out.
In my pursuit of trying to do good and help people with my life, I realized that my privileged life in the U.S., for all of the wonderful blessings it provided me, also made it more difficult to understand what it meant to truly be in need. In order to serve people, I’m a believer that you need to be involved in that world. While I can’t say if having India-specific knowledge will necessarily help me in my career, it has been eye-opening to live in a country that is in a very different economic situation from what I am used to.
In terms of infrastructure, it just became apparent to me how much can happen before planning does. City planners would love to be able to map everything out and ensure that things are built properly, but when there are so many people with so much to do, it seems that sometimes it doesn’t always work out the way you hoped it would. Even in a planned business park area like Gurgaon outside of Delhi (seems a bit like Los Altos, CA), there are very nice office buildings but also a bunch of small shacks and slums that have sprung up around them. Surely this was not a part of the designer’s plans, but what can you do?
Slums do seem to spring up in random places, and sometimes how they’re dealt with can get iffy. This is an issue that isn’t as in your face in the U.S., though it does happen sometimes. From efforts like setting aside affordable housing for young professionals in historically dodgier neighborhoods to the gentrification that occurs around places like Nationals Park in DC, it’s a seemingly less messy “upscaling” that occurs in American cities (though I realize it’s probably still kind of messy..). In India, the poor are always around and continuously remind you that that segment of the population exists. To me at least, this forces you to think about how society and policy handles people who are lower on the economic food chain.
As much as I look forward to getting back Hulu+, access to Thai food, and a house with no ants, I am thankful for the exposure, as brief as it was, to a world where there are a whole different set of challenges that affect such a huge part of the world’s population. I’m hoping that this helps me be a more sympathetic person and have a better understanding of what a bit more of the world actually looks like.